The Odroid N2

Single Board Computer

Sat, 07 Sep 2019

Hardkernel have released a $US70 4GB single board computer based on the Amlogic S922x CPU called the Odroid N2. The S922x CPU contains a quad-core Cortex-A73 as well as a dual-core Cortex-A53. So the cpu can run frugally on the Cortex-A53 cores when demands are low. Reducing power consumption to an incredibly low 2.3 watts from the wall, when the desktop is idling.

With a power consumption of only 2-8 watts I really wasn’t expecting much in the way of desktop performance, but was pleasently surprized. The Mali-G52 MP4 GPU isn’t as fast as say a Intel HD Graphics 4000 (Mali-G52 MP4 GPU benchmarks some 50% slower than HD Graphics 4000 in 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited), but it doesn’t do a bad job at running the MATE desktop in Ubuntu Linux.

The Odroid N2 arrived with Ubuntu installed on an eMMC module so I was easily able to install NGnix to do some performance tests. The arms in the little N2 certainly have legs. It was able to complete 965 req/s to point where my gigabyte lan became the bottleneck. In running the test, the power consumption of Odroid N2 increased from 2.3 watts to 2.9 watts.

Conclusion

The Odroid N2 makes a perfect light web server. Especially if you only need to serve static web pages to the public. The Odroid N2 is a fanless low consumption device that can easily double as a NAS or media centre. The sbc also comes in handy if you want to compile directly on the arm architecture. Lazarus Pascal and FPC happily run on the Odroid N2.